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production unions, which elect a central organ managing the entire national economy of the republic."

The ideas underlying this and numerous similar declarations are fundamentally incorrect theoretically, constituting a complete break with Marxism and Communism, as well as with the results of the practical experience of all semi-proletarian and genuine proletarian revolutions.

First, the concept "producer" unites the proletarian with the semi-proletarian and with the petty commodity producer, thereby fundamentally retreating from the basic concept of class struggle and from the basic requirement to distinguish classes precisely.

Second, reliance on non-party masses, or flirtation with them, which is expressed in the thesis cited, represents no less a fundamental departure from Marxism.

Marxism teaches—and this teaching has not only been formally confirmed by the entire Communist International in the resolution of the II Congress of the Comintern (1920) on the role of the political party of the proletariat, but has also been practically confirmed by our revolution—that only the political party of the working class, i.e., the Communist Party, is capable of uniting, educating, organizing such an avant-garde of the proletariat and of the entire laboring mass, which alone is capable of resisting the inevitable petty-bourgeois vacillations of this mass, the inevitable traditions and recurrences of trade-union narrow-mindedness or trade-union prejudices among the proletariat, and of directing all the unified activity of the entire proletariat, i.e., of directing it politically, and through it of directing all the laboring masses. Without this, the dictatorship of the proletariat is not achievable.

An incorrect understanding of the role of the Communist Party in its relation to the non-party proletariat, and then in relation of the first and second factors to the entire mass of laborers, constitutes a fundamental theoretical departure from Communism and a deviation in the direction of

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syndicalism and anarchism, which deviation permeates all the views of the "Workers' Opposition" group.

4. The X Congress of the RCP declares that it regards as fundamentally incorrect all attempts by the said group and other persons to defend their erroneous views by referring to § 5 of the economic section of the RCP Program, devoted to the role of trade unions. This paragraph states that "trade unions must come to the actual concentration in their hands of the entire management of the entire national economy as a single economic whole" and that they "thereby ensure an unbreakable connection between central state management, the national economy, and the broad masses of laborers," "drawing" these masses "into direct work in the conduct of the economy."

The preliminary condition for such a position, toward which trade unions "must come," the RCP Program declares in that same paragraph to be the process of "ever greater liberation of trade unions from guild narrow-mindedness" and their encompassing of the majority, and "gradually and eventually all" of the laborers.

Finally, in that same paragraph the RCP Program emphasizes that trade unions are "already, according to the laws of the RSFSR and established practice, participants in all local and central organs of industrial management."

Instead of accounting for precisely this practical experience of participation in management, instead of further developing this experience in strict accordance with the successes achieved and the errors corrected, syndicalists and anarchists put forward the immediate slogan of "congresses or a congress of producers," "electing" organs of economic management. The guiding, educative, organizing role of the Party in relation to the trade unions of the proletariat, and of the latter in relation to the semi-petty-bourgeois and directly petty-bourgeois masses of laborers, is thus completely bypassed and eliminated, and instead of a continuation and correction of the practical work of constructing new forms of economy already begun by Soviet power, there results a petty-bourgeois-

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anarchist destruction of this work, capable of leading only to the triumph of bourgeois counter-revolution.